Chair Professor of Cultural Studies and Coordinator of the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme at Lingnan University, Hong Kong

MEAGHAN MORRIS is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies and Coordinator of the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme at Lingnan University, Hong Kong . Her books include Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (co-ed. with Siu-leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, 2005); New Keywords: a Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (co-ed with Tony Bennett and Lawrence Grossberg, 2005); 「Race」 Panic and the Memory of Migration (co-ed. with Brett de Bary, 2001); Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (1998); and The Pirate's Fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism (1988). She is Senior Editor of Traces: a Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation, and in 2004 was elected Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies. Her next book, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture is forthcoming from Sage in 2006.　

Teaching versus Research?: Cultural Studies and the New Class Politics in Knowledge

When I was forced to read Raymond Williams at Sydney University in 1973, I couldn』t understand a word of Culture and Society. My involvement with Cultural Studies began only after I twice wrote a feminist essay (「Banality in Cultural Studies」; short version, 1988,  long version,1990) about how bad I thought it was—as bad as, and undoubtedly sillier than, the work of Jean Baudrillard, which took up at least as much space in my essay. Yet within a few years, I  co-edited with John Frow an anthology, Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (1993), which is now regarded as foundational for the field in my homeland. Yet I have never taught Cultural Studies in Australia, and with some reluctance taught only a couple of graduate classes in the USA. Yet (yet again), since 2000 I have happily been the inaugural Chair Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies in Lingnan University (Hong Kong), an intensively teaching and undergraduate-oriented institution.  

How does this happen? In my paper I will try to make sense of this erratic trajectory in terms of the actual pressures and difficulties confronting (in my experience) progressive scholars working in the context of the neo-liberal globalisation of education and media.